OUT OF CONTROL MERCENARIES

(h/t Atrios)

Blackwater personnel murdered 17 civilians at Nasour square in Baghdad on 9-16-2007 and the company exercised so much power it could threaten American government officials with impunity:

Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater

By JAMES RISEN
JUNE 29, 2014
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

“The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves,” the investigator, Jean C. Richter, wrote in an Aug. 31, 2007, memo to State Department officials. “Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law,” he said, adding that the “hands off” management resulted in a situation in which “the contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control.”

Here's a video of mercenaries acting like mafia hoodlums.